only a gesture
by ribbons-red
Summary: He envied the freedom with which others expressed their affectionate regard, their love. How deliciously ironic, he thinks bitterly, that humanity's strongest warrior cannot excel at such a very human thing. [Levi x Hanji]


**_only a gesture_**

* * *

_He envied the freedom with which others expressed their affectionate regard, their love. How deliciously ironic, he thinks bitterly, that humanity's strongest warrior cannot excel at such a very human thing._

* * *

/./

A sullen youth by nature, his gaze was keen and his thin little body more suited towards quiet observation than the raucous action favored by others of his age.

As such, it was hardly a surprise to often find the child's fragile digits wrapped tightly about the fraying edges of his mother's skirt, his solemn eyes peering out at a world veiled by the lilting laughter of a woman's voice and the light touch of her hand against his round cheek.

Sometimes his lisping, infantile voice conveys his fear of venturing beyond the comforting walls of their little home.

"_Cher Rivaille,"_ his mother often croons in response, the heavy-lashed and refined features of an old race of people transforming into beauty with her adoring smile. "What does it matter if you have not the headstrong foolishness of others that causes them to rush through life? You have possessed a rare inner braveness since you first emerged into this world, so early and yet so determined to seize your first breaths."

Drawing him nearer, she soothingly drags fingers calloused by work through the thick disarray of black hair that lies atop his head. It is a familiar tradition between them—an unspoken comfort that he needs never ask for.

Rivaille thinks, as children often do in their naïve innocence, that if love could become a touchable creation to behold, then it would be that of his mother's gentle caress.

/./

"_Mon pauvre __bébé_," she whispers one afternoon, her fingers threading feebly into his hair. "My poor baby, poor baby."

Hideous crimson splatters onto the yellowish pillow that cradles her head—Rivaille's strangled sob becomes lost amidst the coughs that serrate her lungs and yank blood from her throat. Quivering against her own diseased, shuddering form, he is heartily ashamed of the selfish comfort he finds in his mother's unceasing pats and pacifying touches to his burrowed crown.

They come for her later that night. Masks, those typically worn in sickrooms and by the beds of those who are grotesquely wasting away from infection, obscure their faces and cover all but their gleaming eyes.

Spewing nonsensical words—_potential epidemic _and _prevention_ and _tuberculosis—_they drag her from Levi's tight-fisted grasp.

She is howling and clawing and crying, and by the time the old wooden door of their house slams shut behind the faceless wraiths come to spirit them away, Levi can no longer tell which desperate screams are his own and which have been wrenched from his _Maman_.

Later, curled up in an isolation room, Levi notices ugly splotches of coppery red dried upon his hands.

He will scrub and scrub and scrub and scrub, but they never again fade from his skin.

/./

"Fuck you," comes the eloquent reply, resounding harshly in the empty interrogation room. Commander Erwin, to his credit, seems wholly undisturbed by the order.

Coolly, the blonde-haired man shuffles through a thick sheathe of papers, flipping each one in a methodical manner that was more than a little grating. "Your prowess with your illicit three-dimensional maneuver gear is more than remarkable—it is unprecedented for one who has received no instruction as to its use. You've been abusing its powers in the underbelly of the capital…I am requesting that you employ your abilities in a more constructive, not to mention legal, setting."

"They took her," Levi rasps, grey eyes glinting with more than just a hint of madness. "They took her and they _killed _her. Like an animal—no, like your thrice-damned _Titans_. I won't work for the bastards who…"

He clenches his jaw shut then, the unspoken condemnation of _the ones who stole away my mother from me_ lingering harshly between them.

Erwin sighs, and suddenly his hand lands solidly against Levi's skull. His body tenses for a strike, a twist, a brutal act of _some _sort….

….but pauses in his automatic retaliation, his fingers half-prepared to latch onto Erwin's throat, when he feels the familiar sensation of his hair being ruffled.

"Nor will you have to," the older man reassures him quietly, and there is such an element of _family _and _kindness_ that Levi swallows hard and remembers two young brothers that had grown up in the house beside his, remembers the common sight of the littler clinging happily to his elder kin.

Levi doesn't know why he thinks of that.

"You've lived for so long with that misery, haven't you? But I, not the king, am asking for your help in ensuring that precious few are ever subjected to a fate such as yours."

Grey eyes glance upwards; for a fleeting moment, his mother's bright face replaces that of the world-weary soldier's.

And Levi mutters an agreement.

/./

When he first meets her, that slightly-frightening girl with the messy brown hair and flashing glasses and a loud voice that could screech a crow into deafness, the first impulse that strikes him is to turn sharply on his heel and beat a hasty retreat to a place far away from his superior in rank and junior in age.

Brown eyes glint with a fierce inner light, derived only from a human's delight in existing, as she pins him in place with a maniacal glare and demands his name.

Really, it's almost goddamn inevitable that he falls in love with her.

"Why do you do that?" she inquires curiously one day, curled up beside him in an uncommon display of docility from her. For once, she is content not to talk his ear off about Titans (_although he'll never admit to secretly enjoying the happiness of her voice and the warm breath that curls against his neck that means she's so very, very alive_) and simply relishes in the kiss of grass against her nose and the tickle of Levi's cloak against her cheek.

"What?"

"_That,_" she says, clarifying with an idle wave towards the hand entangled in her (only marginally) chaotic locks. Her entire demeanor, from tone to toes, gradually adopts that 'inquisitive scientist' persona of hers. "You're always finding some way of running your hands through my hair. I'd accuse you of some secret vendetta of trying to make it neater, but I think we both agree that's a pretty damn big lost cause."

His fingers stiffen with a tense rapidity, and Levi silently curses his lover's perceptiveness—the very definition of an attribute that constituted both a blessing and a curse. "Hn," he grumbles noncommittally, in the vain hope that a laconic reproach will be enough to stymie her inquisitiveness.

It isn't.

"Ah," she intones with a heavy note of slyness. "I believe I've figured it out. The fearless, ass-kicking Captain Levi's actually a sucker for playing with hair, huh?"

"Think what you want, Shitty Glasses."

"Oi, come on! Tell me!"

"It's nothing," he murmurs dismissively, repressing a vague smirk at the petulant frown she levels at him. "It's only a gesture."

One day he will tell her—tell her it is undoubtedly the purest form of affection he has been taught how to display by the kindest woman he's ever known, and that he will only ever bestow it upon her—but not now.

After all, comes the nebulously morbid and slightly fatalistic thought, they have many days before them in which humanity's epitome of strength can learn how to express such a sentiment.

/./

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**Author's note: ****Drabble-y Levihan story written for a friend who requested me to make something based on the Levi-holding-Hanji's-hair scene in the anime. Forgive any errors, for this was composed between some very stressful classes today! I'd love to hear anyone's opinion on it. **


End file.
